1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a directivity control system and a sound output control method capable of controlling output of sound data which is collected in a privacy protection region inside a sound collection space.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the related art, in surveillance systems installed at predetermined positions (for example, a ceiling) of factories, companies, stores (for example, retail stores or banks), or public places (for example, a library), a plurality of camera apparatuses (for example, a pan/tilt camera apparatus or an omnidirectional camera apparatus) are connected to each other via a network, so as to achieve a wide angle of view of image data (including a still image and a moving image; this is also the same for the following) of a monitoring target in a predetermined range.
In addition, since an information amount obtained with the monitoring only using images may possibly be limited, there are increasing demands for a surveillance system in which a microphone array apparatus as well as the camera apparatus is disposed, and thus sound data is obtained in a direction (hereinafter, referred to as an “imaging direction”) in which a specific subject is imaged by the camera apparatus.
Here, a control apparatus is known which controls each operation of a camera apparatus and a microphone array apparatus so as to obtain sound data of a subject which is present in an imaging direction of the camera apparatus (for example, refer to JP-A-2012-186551). A control apparatus disclosed in JP-A-2012-186551 controls each operation of, for example, a camera apparatus which is installed in a conference room which is available to a television conference system and is operable in a horizontal direction (panning direction) and a microphone array apparatus which can change a sound collection range.
The control apparatus disclosed in JP-A-2012-186551 changes a sound collection range of the microphone array apparatus by using a distance between a position of the camera apparatus and a position of a subject captured in an image acquired by the camera apparatus, a panning direction of the camera apparatus, a distance between the position of the camera apparatus and a position of the microphone array apparatus, and a direction of the position of the microphone array apparatus with the position of the camera apparatus as a reference.